Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Reducing my Digital Burden

Last weekend, I started a process that some may consider regressive. I began deleting my social media accounts to improve the signal to noise ratio in my life.

10 years ago I wrote about the importance of social media and building networks of colleagues, collaborators and relationships.

During that decade our social norms have changed to the point that we walk off cliffs, text while driving, and document every microsecond of our lives on devices that have become the centerpiece of our waking hours.

The problem has gotten so profound that Google has introduced artificial intelligence technology to respond to messaging for you - “LOL”, “cute dog”, “a movie at 7pm is great”.

Here’s a twisted idea - maybe my wife and I should sign up for the new Google service and just let her account speak with my account while we go for a quiet walk in the forest. Problem solved :-)

What have I done to begin cleaning up my digital life?

1. I have deleted my LinkedIn account and its thousands of incoming messages. There are 4 John Halamka profiles left - two of which are fraudulent and two of which belong to my father who passed away 3 years ago.

2. I have deleted my Plaxo account. Plaxo seems to have faded in popularity and usefulness, so maybe no one will notice

3. I have deleted my Google+ account. Although it was an interesting idea, I found Google+ most useful to communicate with Google employees.

4. I have deleted my Microsoft Healthvault account. I no longer find it useful middleware for communication with my providers.

5. I have blocked all newsletters from Constant Contact and other “business spammers” from my inboxes.

I had planned on deleting my Facebook account but my wife noted that our farm communications depend upon reaching my network of contacts, so she will continue to update my Facebook network.

The end result is that I have a digital clean slate - no pending inboxes, notifications, or queues. I can go through the day not staring at my phone or receiving a cacophony of chirps/beeps/dings/bells/chimes. I can have conversations without guilt. I can mentor people without losing my train of thought. I can return to my usual work pattern of deep focus rather than superficial bursts of concentration.

Some may accuse me of losing touch or suffering a loss of agility in my 54 year old mind.

Some may say that continuous partial attention is adaptive to the interconnected global economy and that we all should adopt a communication style similar to “Spock’s Brain” - constantly responding to every input like an automaton.

I have told my staff in the past that when I’m an impediment to innovation, it’s time for me to go. I do not think this streamlining of my digital life is a sign that my losing my passion for improvement. Instead, I think I’ve changed my definition of improvement. When I first started using a Blackberry 850 in 1999, it empowered me to leave my desk and respond to incidents while traveling. A two way pager improved my productivity and mobility. Today we keep our digital devices on our nightstands and reflexively check for communications every 30 seconds (or more). They have become an addiction that makes us work more hours but not necessarily more efficiently.

I completely understand that the way we work will change over time, increasingly moving to bursts of virtual communication. At the same time, I know that innovation requires a deep dive to solve complex problems. By shedding my digital burden, while keeping a minimal number of communication modalities, I can balance my service to the community of stakeholders and the hours needed to deliver tangible products/services.

4 comments:

Good post and we certainly have to limit some of this agreed and have done the same. I went a little further with my analogy actually back in 2013 stating that people can't tell the difference anymore between a "real world" value and "virtual world" values. We see it all the time and when PokemanGo showed up, well it was really in our face to wake up:) I call it the Dupes of Hazard Society out there today, scary indeed as what I call "Operation Perception-Deception" keeps tugging at our digital links in one form or another.

New book out there discusses a lot of this called "Weapons of Math Destruction" and how excess scoring and algorithms are not held to accountability out there today. Cathy, the author is a former Wall Street Quant who had a bird's eye view of a lot of things the rest of us don't get to see for sure.

I have found myself pulling back in similar fashion from these same sources of noise and distractions. A quick question - for step #5, did you implement a global solution to block constant contact-generated emails? I am losing that battle.

Linkedin is still very good for business-oriented networking. Especially if you are looking for work. Maybe that works for a well known doctor in Boston but not for most of us. However, agree that Linkedin, especially now that it will be owned by Microsoft, can be a distraction with all its sharing and articles, etc.

The problem with social media is not social media but rather the devices. Computers were built fundamentally to time share as you know (the software and hardware across the machine). Instead the programmers of the world have created devices that try to share our time and now we have become multitasking creatures unable to make it through one task for more than 15 minutes.

In the Star Trek universe, where computer and communication technology is of course so far advanced, somehow humans are not contstantly checking their social media. Maybe it will be looked back at as a massive fad some day. Of course Star Trek rarely shows what masses of developing people do in their downtime.